Brown CS Blog

Last week, Brown CS Master's student Ilana Nguyen spoke at the UN about AI in education. The central question: How do we ensure that AI expands opportunity rather than reinforce existing inequities?

Imagine watching a concert not from a fixed camera angle, but from any angle. The catch? Volumetric video is incredibly hard to store and stream, and you can have the most photorealistic 4D scene in the world, but if you can't get it to a viewer efficiently, it's stuck in a lab. Our work, PackUV, tackles exactly this problem.

Sam Dooman, a Brown CS alum who also studied music, works as the founding engineer at Down Dog, a company that develops apps for practicing fitness at home, including yoga, high-intensity interval training, and meditation.

In this paper, we leverage a 3D Geometric Foundation Model to build a self-supervised pipeline that evaluates 3D consistency in AI-generated videos. By integrating our video generation model with reinforcement learning, we are able to generate highly 3D-coherent and realistic videos. This approach significantly reduces morphing, flickering, and artifacts, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.

The Sunlab is no longer with us. Students who graduated in the past decade or so think of it mainly as a place where they could use desktop computers running Linux and attend TA hours and help sessions. But it started as something different.

Thinking about Tom, and our work together in the Department, several passionate themes come to mind – so many that I’ve only been able to write them at this final moment.

This summer, on a grant from Brown's Startup Fellowship program, Eric Xia developed www.word.golf with Julian Beaudry, a fellow CS undergraduate. They've done their best to follow a spirit of inquiry, creating a project which challenges the imagination while retaining a sense of familiarity and playfulness.

I was one of 26 Brown students among the 2,500 invited to the Y Combinator AI Startup School. Engulfing an entire warehouse in San Francisco, the event featured incredible speakers, leaving me with new insights about Silicon Valley and Brown’s unique elements and the future of AI ventures.

Brown University doctoral student Zainab Iftikhar is the friend people turn to when they need to talk. 

“My family jokes that I’m the ‘therapist friend’ everyone calls when they have a problem,” Iftikhar said. 

Her capacity for caregiving has informed her research at Brown, where she is focused on exploring technology’s therapeutic strengths and weaknesses to find ways people can best use AI to support social and mental health. Her research has spotlighted humans’ inherent ability to offer and detect empathy, which is something that chatbots, text-based therapists and other artificial intelligence systems don’t do well, she said. 

The chatbots routinely violated core mental health ethics standards, underscoring the need for legal standards and oversight.